Energy Matters

I find planes fascinating. Those humongous machines are capable of flying thousands of miles at speeds just below the speed of sound, cruising over  35,000 feet above MSL, with hundreds of passengers in comfort and safely at prices that billions of people can afford.

If in the year 1900 — that wasn’t too long ago — you had told someone that traveling at 500 miles per hour would be commonplace by the year 1970 (the year the jumbo jet Boeing 747 entered service), they would worry about your sanity. Furthermore, if you insisted that people would be traveling around 7 miles above the earth while crossing continents, they would have you committed to a lunatic asylum.

It’s hard enough to get up to 7 miles above ground. But on top of that, to move at 500 miles per hour? That’s two impossible feats at the same time. That’s unbelievable squared.

I often meditate on the fact that these commercial jetliners evolved from their ancestral form around the year 1900 in less than half a century. Their progenitor was built out of wood, fabric and wires by a couple of bicycle mechanics from Dayton, OH. They started with experimenting with gliders for several years, and then having figured out the physics of flight, added an engine that they built in their shop. The first powered flight was on 17th December 1903 in Kitty Hawk, NC.

At the end of that day in December 1903, exactly one person had ever flown in a heavier than air flying machine in the history of human civilization. He flew 120 feet. By now, around 5 billion people have been in a plane in the 122 years since then. I suppose trillions of miles of flying has been covered by now. (How I came to this 5 billion estimate is a different matter I will not go into now. I am not talking of passenger trips but people who have flown ever. My estimate of passenger trips is 100 billion.) 

I am willing to bet good money that everyone who is reading this piece has taken several commercial flights. When faced with the prospect of another flight, most of the time we are not excited about it. Economy class is no fun but even business or first class could get boring. Unless of course you are like me and start thinking about not just the miracle of flight but also how amazing the planes are.

To start off, consider the fact that the jetliner is huge and therefore made of lots of stuff. What kinds of materials are used in the manufacturing? I suspect that there must be hundreds of distinct materials — steel, copper, titanium, aluminum, rubber plastic, glass, carbon fiber, and other exotic combinations of materials too many to list. That’s fascinating enough.

But what’s more fascinating is that every bit of whatever materials went into the manufacturing of the plane came from what is found near or close to the surface of the earth. Sure, nature provided all the raw materials but humans transformed them into useful bits through innumerable processes.

The airframes were made mostly out of aluminum because it is lighter than steel, it is quite durable and not too difficult to work with. Modern planes have a lot of advanced composite materials that are lighter and have better properties than aluminum. The turbine engines (both turbofans and turboprops) are the most sophisticated part of planes. They require special alloys of tungsten and steel that we cannot even imagine.

Be that as it may, the point is that when you want to make a plane from scratch, you have to begin with digging stuff out of the ground. Let’s say, you get iron ore and bauxite (the primary source of aluminum.) Then the ores have to be refined and the metals extracted. In the case of transforming iron ore into steel, you have to have blast furnaces. In the case of aluminum, you have to use boat-loads of electricity. The metal has to be cast, or forged, and shaped, and sent to the factory where they make the needed parts.

What do we need to accomplish the bits mentioned above? You need people and you need machines. And you need technology. You need the know-how of what to mine, how to mine, how to transport them, how to build a blast furnace, how to forge the whatchamacallit, etc. From the ground and into the plane takes hundreds of distinct steps which involve knowledge and machines and people.

And on top of that, nothing can get done without energy. Every step requires energy. The simplest description of the production process of an airplane is that it is a product of technology, stuff from the ground and energy. Technology requires people. So we need people to provide the technology, machines (which too are ultimately the product of technology, people, stuff from the ground and energy) and energy.

So let’s restate the conclusion: everything (not just planes) is a product of people (that know things), stuff from the ground, and energy. These are called factors because they are combined to produce the product. (Like the factors 3 and 5 multiplied produce 15 as the product.)

Let’s talk about technology. Everything we know about the making of airplanes has been discovered, invented and innovated in the last couple of hundred years. Remember that the natural stuff we find near or close to the surface of the earth using which we manufacture everything has been around for billions of years. But there were no airplanes or whatever you see around yourself for those billions of years. That’s because there was no technology for billions of years. 

People like us have been around for a while too: 200 thousand years or so. Most of the technology was developed only by the most recent dozen generations (about 250 years) of people. Even our most recent ancestors would not recognize all the things around us we take for granted.

Only a handful of technologies — iron and steel, for example — are ancient. The iron age started around 3,000 years before the present. Steel took another millennia. But nearly all of the rest is modern.

The modern world is a very recent development. For all of human existence, we humans were primitives. Only with the advent of modern humans homo sapiens did we begin to progress. That progress was powered by technology. The most important of the technologies that anatomically modern humans developed was about energy.

Energy is Shiva, the Destroyer. Energy is the creator too. Let’s explore that next.

Previous bit: Cheaper All the Time. Next bit: Cost.

Author: Atanu Dey

Economist. View all posts by Atanu Dey